(bright music)
- I'm Angela Olinto, I'm professor of astronomy
and astrophysics at the University of Chicago
and I'm the principle investigator for
the Extreme Universe Space Observatory
on a super pressure balloon that we called EUSO-SPB.
EUSO-SPB will fly from Wanaka, New Zealand
on a NASA super pressure balloon for what we hope
to be a very long, ultra long duration balloon flight.
Hopefully we can make a record this time around.
While it's flying, EUSO-SPB will be observing,
from above the atmosphere, the Southern Ocean,
searching for the most energetic cosmic particles
that we've ever observed.
The origin of these cosmic particles is a great mystery
that we would like to solve with this mission.
EUSO-SPB is a refractor telescope made with 1.2-meter lenses
and these lenses are state of the art in their likeness,
they are made with Fresnel design
so that they can be very light and lifted by the balloon.
We have a 3-meter optical bench
and then on the top of the optical bench
is this wonderfully fast camera,
an ultra fast UV camera
that takes 400,000 pictures a second.
So these 400,000 pictures a second are monitoring particles
that will be arriving on the atmosphere
at the speed of light, very close to the speed of light.
Now we don't know what's causing these particles,
if these are super massive black holes
and centers of galaxies that are able to accelerate
these cosmic messengers or maybe very fast,
ultra fast spinning pulsars, very tiny fast-spinning stars.
We really don't know,
and this is what we're looking forward to figuring out
with this wonderful opportunity
to fly on an ultra long duration flight.
This wonderful opportunity for EUSO-SPB
to fly on an ultra long duration flight
will open this new window of observing cosmic race
from above which will be the pioneering mission
for a space mission in the future,
that we're planning right now,
that would be able to really solve this mystery
by enlarging the volume of the atmosphere
that we can observe at once.
These particles are very rare.
They have made this long journey,
they're incredibly mysterious but they only reach the earth
one per kilometer square per century
so we need a huge amount of volume of the atmosphere
being observed at once to be able to see many of them.
EUSO-SPB was designed by a 16 country collaboration
which is geared towards a space mission
and the space mission that we designed first
was for the ISS, International Space Station,
and a balloon opportunity came up
and this became the way to prove our technology,
so we're very excited about this opportunity.
One difference between a space mission and a balloon mission
is that we can involve a lot more people
in a balloon mission that are doing undergraduate
and graduate studies under this project.
We have actually in Wanaka three undergraduates
and a number of graduate students.
Now that we're ready to go,
it's time to thank so much effort from many teams.
To start, NASA for their support
and for the team here in Wanaka airport.
The Columbia Scientific Ballooning Facility,
that we usually call CSBF,
they have been an amazing team, interacting with us at any,
all levels and making this integration
of the science payload and the balloon effort seamless.
It's really been a great experience
for everybody in our team
and obviously I have to thank our huge collaboration
of 16 countries and in particular the several ones
that are present here in Wanaka and the local community
that has been brilliant at warm welcoming us
into their family and it's just been
a wonderful experience altogether so thank you everybody.
(bright music)